Derek Walcott Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Derek Walcott:

The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Derek Walcott

The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.

Derek Walcott

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Derek Walcott

I have no curiosity. I'm an island boy.

Derek Walcott

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

Derek Walcott

I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.

Derek Walcott

There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.

Derek Walcott

My mother hid the struggle from us children. She complained about her salary, and she had a tough time. Although she became a headmistress, she still had to do a lot of sewing. The more I think about her, the more remarkable I realise she was. And she understood straight away when I said that I wanted to write.

Derek Walcott

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Derek Walcott

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing.

Derek Walcott

I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender.

Derek Walcott

The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

Derek Walcott

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.

Derek Walcott

My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.

Derek Walcott

What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.

Derek Walcott

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

Derek Walcott

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

Derek Walcott

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Derek Walcott

There is a restless identity in the New World. The New World needs an identity without guilt or blame.

Derek Walcott

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

Derek Walcott

My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.

Derek Walcott

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

Derek Walcott

I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about.

Derek Walcott

My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.

Derek Walcott

My relationship to Britain is of no consequence.

Derek Walcott

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

Derek Walcott

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Derek Walcott

Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.

Derek Walcott

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

Derek Walcott

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

Derek Walcott

I didn't pass the scholarship exam for Oxford because of poor mathematics.

Derek Walcott

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.

Derek Walcott

I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.

Derek Walcott

Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.

Derek Walcott

Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.

Derek Walcott

When you're young, influences count.

Derek Walcott